This is another review that I’m going to start with the conclusion:  BUY this book.  And however much you love your Kindle or other ebook device, buy the physical book.  This is a book you’re going to want to dog-ear, highlight, and annotate.  The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith is one of those books, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, that people will be pointing to decades down the road as a readable wake-up call regarding a problem that many people don’t know we have.

The first reason you’re going to want this book is in case you have, as a former neighbor of mine did, a teenaged daughter who comes home from school one day and announces that she is a vegetarian.  This will most likely be because she has decided that animals have feelings and “meat is murder.”  It is also likely that to her, “vegetarian” means she’s going to live on Coke and french fries, which will demonstrate how well thought out her new position is.  (Okay, it might be your son, but statistically speaking, it’s more likely to be your daughter.)  The first thing you should do is call the school, because it’s very likely that a teacher or teacher’s aide has been proselytizing to her, and the school needs to know (and put a stop to it).  The second thing you should do is send her to the next-door neighbor who has enough knowledge in physiology, animal husbandry, and agribusiness to refute her claims in painful detail.  No?  Then give her this book and let Lierre Keith do it.  Keith has the added bonus of street cred, because she was a practicing vegan for almost 20 years until it nearly killed her.  I never drank that Kool-Aid.  Keith is also a radical feminist lesbian with pagan leanings, so if any of that will make your head blow off, be warned.  I did feel the occasional urge the stand up and defend my husband and other good men from Keith’s wholesale condemnation of the masculine gender, but thankfully, those bits are few enough and far enough between not to ruin the book.

Validation and Vocation

English philosopher Gilbert Ryle wrote, “To explode a myth is… not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.”  One of the reasons Keith’s arguments are so persuasive is that she repeatedly validates the goals and motivations of vegetarians, while demonstrating that their actions are wrong because they don’t have enough information.  Since Keith acquired the information through a long process of personal enlightenment, she is able to deliver it in a way that embraces the cause while rejecting the conclusions.  It’s a much easier pill to swallow than an eye-rolling dismissal by those of us who got the information earlier and more easily.  And Keith details her well-meaning struggle so beautifully that I had to laugh at episodes like her slug catch-and-release program while still thinking she was nuts.  And I truly didn’t think there was anybody crazier than fruitarians.  Breatharians?  Are you kidding me?  Did you all fail biology?  (My husband points out that a group that advocates not eating is much like the Shakers, a group that forbids sex, in that it is a problem which will resolve itself in the fullness of time.)

Keith’s arguments are organized based on the three oft-touted rationales for vegetarianism, Moral Vegetarianism (“meat is murder”), Political Vegetarianism (“meat is an inefficient and unfair use of global resources by massive corporations”), and Nutritional Vegetarianism (“meat is unhealthy”).  She acknowledges where each group has the right idea, and then demonstrates where they’ve gone wrong.  Agriculture kills more animals than slaughterhouses. Plants can’t make food without dead animal parts.  Monocrops like corn and soy have done more damage to third-world economies than oppressive regimes and natural disasters combined, and many well-known “organic” food brands are owned by chemical companies.  And sorry, but our bodies need things (certain vitamins and amino acids) they can only get from eating animal products.  Go omnivore or go home, in a box.

The Politics of Corn

The thing about the book that reminds me of Silent Spring is that it unabashedly attacks monocrop politics in the same way that Rachel Carson attacked pesticides.  I annually drive across the country to visit family and friends, and the miles of corn and soy that I pass make me cringe.  And the corn isn’t even the kind people want to eat (sweet corn, popcorn), it’s the kind that will be processed into meal, animal feed, and corn syrup (dent corn).  This corn is heavily subsidized by your tax dollars, and that keeps it so cheap that it literally sells for less than it costs to grow.  That in turn keeps the cost of every product that uses corn syrup artificially low, as well as the cost of every animal product that the corn gets fed to.  It’s a scary and uncomfortable chapter, though happily the shortest.

Keith accepts the same sad fact that Rachel Carson accepted– high yields of cereal grains farmed with petroleum fertilizer are keeping a huge chunk of the population from starving to death, just as higher yields of crops sprayed with DDT did before it was banned.  It’s incredibly hard to tell millions of people that they can only stay alive by inflicting enormous damage on the environment.  But poisons will build up and fossil fuels will run out.  It’s a pyramid scheme of cereal grain.  My father spent most of his working life as a petroleum geologist, and I can tell you that the oil industry knows exactly how finite the supply of fossil fuel is, and because they don’t want to cease to exist, they are actually working really hard to develop other fuel sources.  I’m not sure the same is true of the petroleum-based fertilizer industry.  Currently, the bulk of the criticism against Keith’s book is from angry vegetarians who think she’s lying because she got sick and wants to blame them.  If Monsanto starts a smear campaign, as they did with Rachel Carson, Keith will know she has really arrived.

I was that 7-year-old girl weeping through Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” wondering why the camera crew didn’t stop the mean lion, hyena, (insert your favorite predator here), etc. from killing the poor zebra. 

Cream Puffs of the World, Unite!

The Moral chapter touched me especially, because as the saying goes, “There but for Fortune…”  I am a cream puff (crunchy outside, gooey center).  I was that 7-year-old girl weeping through Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” wondering why the camera crew didn’t stop the mean lion, hyena, (insert your favorite predator here), etc. from killing the poor zebra.  No later shots of adorable cubs gnawing on zebra parts could assuage the horror of the kill.  Had I not been raised by a scientist father who encouraged my critical thinking and a dietitian mother who came from a rural background, I probably would have given up meat, too.  My mother often told me that when she was a child and her father brought home a batch of chicks, the chicks were divided among the five children, who had the responsibility for feeding them.  Since my mother was a cream puff who snuck extra treats to her chicks, they got fat first.  She wept and went hungry through many a Sunday dinner, despite my grandmother’s attempts to insist that this piece of chicken came from somebody else’s bird.  Her grief was acknowledged, but not to the point where birds meant for the family to live on became pets.

I did not complete my education to become a veterinarian, because once I started working in an animal hospital I learned a painful truth.  I could be a veterinarian OR I could have a life, but not both.  If there was an animal that was critically ill, I couldn’t bear the thought of locking up the hospital, going home, and leaving that animal to die alone in a cage.  So I sat with it, sometimes for hours.  I exhausted myself, and I have no idea whether I brought the dying animal any comfort or not (a lot of animals crawl off to die by themselves on purpose).  I actually cared too much to be effective at my job.  Care costs, and often what it costs is reason.  So I switched to accounting, because I’ve never wept over a balance sheet, no matter how bad it looked.

To this day, I feed anything cute and fuzzy.  I admit to being terribly species-ist, though.  I feed squirrels, but rejoice when my cat kills a rat.  I avoid pesticides as much as I can, but I will not cohabit with wasps, mosquitoes, or fire ants.  Spiders and other ant varieties can stay as long as they’re content to live outside.  If they come in my house, they’re toast.  And I’m a dedicated carnivore.  I have seen humane slaughter facilities; we should all go so quickly and painlessly.  I believe that animals we are going to ask for the ultimate sacrifice deserve to be husbanded, given a good life and a swift and skillful death.  And I know that often, especially in the conglomerate agribusiness of today, that doesn’t happen.  (Cows do fairly well, because their meat changes color when they get scared.  Not birds.  If the idea of animal cruelty worries you, do not eat major-producer poultry.)

Death, Death, Death, Lunch…

I grew up Catholic, and on Ash Wednesday, the priest marks your head with ash and says, “Remember, man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.”  It’s more than a little scary, but maybe it would have saved Lierre Keith years of torment.  Because her ultimate epiphany that led her back to sanity was that everything dies.  And everything lives because something else died.  The zebra eats the grass, the lion eats the zebra, the lion dies and rots into the ground, ultimately feeding the grass.  We can’t digest cellulose, so we need to eat something that can.  That makes us lions, not zebras, but we’re still going to be grass one day.  And the soil bacteria will receive us as happily as we receive that prime rib.

Sadly, we are locked in a room where every exit has explosives wired to it.  Require naturally sustainable crop production?  End government subsidies? Food costs will skyrocket.  Save the planet, watch people starve.  Require all biological waste to be reintegrated into the soil?  Oh, the smell.  I went to an Ag school, and between the dairy barn, the horse barn, the pig barn, etc., you had to get used to bad smells or transfer.  But most people won’t sign on for living next to fresh animal waste.  They don’t even like it when their gardener spreads nice, clean processed manure on their lawn.  Grow only grass-fed beef and dairy, and free-range omnivorous poultry?  Again with those skyrocketing food costs.  Require food to be grown within 1000 miles of where it is consumed?  I’m good with that, because I live in Texas.  There isn’t much I want to eat that can’t grow or live here.  But a lot of the country, a lot of the world, is going to be hungry.  And angry. 

I hate to adopt an “après moi, le déluge” attitude, but the cold fact is that the crisis won’t come in my lifetime.  And I’m not prepared either to volunteer to die, or to tell someone else they have to starve because cereal grains are killing the planet.  I’m also enough of an optimist to believe that there are solutions to be found to accelerate topsoil regrowth, given dedicated scientific minds and political will.  I guess the politicians just aren’t scared enough.  Yet.  Maybe I should mail out a few copies of the book to my congressmen.

Gary Taubes is a smart guy.  A really smart guy.  I mean, I don’t know his GPA, but Applied Physics at Harvard, Aerospace Engineering at Stanford, and Journalism at Columbia is not an academic course for the weak-minded.  As a scientist, then a science writer, Taubes is very experienced at critical reading of science literature and scientific studies.  (He’s done the reading, so you don’t have to.)  In Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It (Knopf, December 2010), Taubes lays out the arguments for the link between obesity and starch, and (and here’s the important part) he backs it up with a wheelbarrow load of science.  The depressing part is that the science isn’t new; a lot of it has been around for years, and some of it has been around for almost 200 years.

Joining the Shouting

Taubes cut his teeth as a science journalist by finding scientists who set themselves up as newly-clothed emperors and then casting himself in the role of the only kid honest enough to tell the emperor that he’s buck naked.  Taubes started on the “conventional diet wisdom” brigade in a 2001 New York Times Magazine article entitled, “What If It’s All a Big, Fat Lie?”  He followed that with his first nutrition science book, Good Calories, Bad Calories (Knopf, September 2007).  In GCBC he detailed the sad history of the last 200 years, in which smart people who pointed out that all available evidence suggests that starch and sugar, not fats, make us fat were loudly, systematically, and institutionally shouted down by medical, scientific and governmental bodies.  These august bodies were, for some reason, absurdly resistant to the idea that fat people weren’t simply lazy and gluttonous.  Taubes introduces many chapters with quotes from French physiologist Claude Bernard, whose 1865 work Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine is considered one of the foundations of the current “blind” study standard of experimentation.  The quotes, and indeed much of the book, boil down to the idea that people are going to believe what they’ve been told, and that it’s psychologically less painful for them to ignore and belittle new evidence than to admit they’ve been believing something that wasn’t true.  I mean, how long did people resist the notions that the world wasn’t flat and that the sun didn’t revolve around us?

My favorite section in GCBC is called “The Eisenhower Paradox.”  In 1955, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, and his became the most publicized heart disease in history.  He was placed on a low-fat (high-carb) diet, and years later his physician wrote joyfully of the success of the diet, despite the fact that Eisenhower was both fatter and sicker after having been on it.  The argument that he would have been fatter and sicker still had he stayed on his old diet rings pretty hollow when you consider that Eisenhower had maintained roughly the same weight for years that he had as an active military man until his diet was radically altered away from fat and towards more carbs.

GCBC has a lot of history and a lot of science, and if you like a challenging read, you’ll find it fascinating.  But it is a tough read.  I also found it incredibly negative in tone.  Taubes’ books have typically been, if not hatchet jobs, at least as much exposé as education, and starting with “Big, Fat Lie” and continuing with GCBC, his first goal seems to have been to tell you that everything you know is wrong, and that you’ve been led to believe these wrong things at the feet of experts who were at best, misguided, and at worst, crooked.  Anyone who wants to be an agent of change will tell you that one of the first things you have to do is make people mad, and if you can get through it, GCBC will make you mad.  (Hint: Never let a politician interpret science for you.)

Why Are We Fat?

With Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It Taubes has done a few wise (and commercially savvy) things with his message.  There is still plenty of science, but it’s diced up into nice, digestible bits.  And I felt the tone was a lot more positive, not so much “you have been lied to!” as “here’s the way it is, and here’s how to fix it.”   WWGF opens with observations made by Dr. Hilde Bruch, a pioneer in childhood obesity, that when she came to America in 1934 she couldn’t recall ever having seen so many fat children, many of whom were Depression-era poor and as malnourished as they were fat.  In a time before there was a McBurger on every corner, it’s a challenge to the notion that fast food and Xbox are solely responsible for obesity in our kids.

Above all, Taubes wants you to ditch the idea of “calories in, calories out” as the explanation for weight, and that shakes my world view painfully.  I try to keep my mind open, and Taubes has given me a lot to think about.  But there are a few things I’d like Taubes to think about as well.  A lot of the studies he cites are observations on single-generation changes in eating, often involving indigenous people or subsistance cultures.  If you take a Native American, tell him to stop hunting and growing the crops he’s lived on for generations, and stick him on a reservation with unlimited supplies of white flour, white sugar, and infamous government cheese, he’s going to be obese and diabetic.  Duh.  So would most people, even from cultures that have at least ten generations of metabolism of simple grains and dairy.  It’s no surprise that when you give someone food that their entire gene pool has never encountered, bad things happen, especially when that strange food is seductive to the taste.  There’s a bedroom community near me that is also home to a landlocked population of formerly wild deer.  Now they hang out on people’s lawns and watch the cars go by.  The neighborhood has been pleading with folks not to feed the deer, because most of the feeders buy “deer corn” that is in effect feeding them a diet of nothing but Snickers bars.  It’s sweet-tasting, so they’ll eat it preferentially over normal grazing.  The deer breed like mad, but are sickly and weak without proper (for a deer) nutrition.

Hanging Off the Bumper of the Bandwagon

I will agree that most people eat too much sugar and starch.  And many of them don’t tolerate it well.  But some can handle it better than others.  You can be plump with normal blood chemistry and skinny with tri-glycerides through the roof.  It scares me a little when someone on a strict diet delightedly announces that they got effortlessly down to a size 4.  It makes me want to see her family photographs and her blood panel; it’s only good news to be a size 4 if you are the healthy size 4 you were meant to be.  I’d have to have ribs removed, and I’d look like a cadaver.  And if it meant giving up sugar and starch forever, I’d be an ill-humored cadaver.

The problem with completely denying the “calories in, calories out” school of thought is that in the extreme, it’s correct.  If you eat nothing, you’ll starve to death.  If you eat to excess, even if you don’t take in a scrap of carb to stimulate an insulin response, some other body system will break down and kill you.  (Too much protein will overload your liver and your kidneys.)  I completely accept Taubes’ discussion on insulin resistance, and I will wholeheartedly agree that for some morbidly obese people, they have no choice but to trick their metabolisms back on the rails again.  They are broken, endocrinologically speaking, and eating less and exercising more is not going to help them.  On the other hand, if you are gaining and losing the same 10 pounds over and over, and are in good health otherwise, thinking about calories in and out is probably your best bet.  You don’t need a complete upheaval of your eating habits.  Skip the baked potato, but if you do, feel free to have the cheesecake.

Health and wellness, heck, our very existence on the planet is a balancing act.  Starch is not evil.  Cereal grains are keeping a pretty large percentage of the human population alive.  If they’re killing you, cut down.  A lot.  Think about what and how much you put into your mouth.  Your genetic heritage may mean that you should be counting carbs rather than calories; it may also mean that you should be a healthy size 12.  But if you have always struggled with your weight, give Taubes’ WWGF a look.  It might have some 200-year-old wisdom to teach you.

 

Where to begin?  Unlike Peter D’Adamo’s Eat Right 4 Your Type, where I could quickly and easily dismiss the author as a crackpot, Loren Cordain’s  The Paleo Diet (Wiley, revised edition December, 2010) contains enough facts and actual sense that I have to wonder where the obviously intelligent Cordain got off the logic train.

If you are familiar with the Paleo Diet and you think Cordain walks on water, stop reading now, because I’m about to say bad things about him. <pauses for the misguided to leave>  (The quotes in this paragraph are straight from Cordain’s website, with the links to prove it.)  Okay, PhDoctor Cordain, I have two giant problems with your book, website, method, etc.  You begin by announcing, “The Paleo Diet, the world’s healthiest diet…”  ANYBODY who makes that claim had better follow it with the endorsement of the AMA and the World Health Organization, which of course, he has not got.  Cordain’s referenced dietary studies have more holes in them than the swiss cheese you can’t have on the diet.  By far the scariest thing, though, is that by following Cordain’s diet you can supposedly “slow progression of an autoimmune disease” and “reduce or eliminate your risk of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and the vast majority of all chronic degenerative diseases that affect humanity.”  Really?  When someone tells you that you can cure cancer or lupus by eating better, RUN.  Anything that follows is sure to be heavily laced with snake oil (which, as an animal product, probably is on the diet).

Good Caveman, Bad Caveman

I spent most of my time reading this book, as well as its slightly more academic predecessor, Neanderthin by Ray Audette, feeling incredibly torn.  I would read one sentence and think, “That is factual and sensible.”  I would read the next and fling the book across the room.  The conventional advice on how to lie convincingly is to “sandwich a lie between two truths,” and I can’t help feeling that these books are doing much the same thing.  Because I have a science background, I could go through point-by-point and illustrate where studies are flawed or syllogistic conclusions are backwards, but that takes a lot longer than it takes for an author trying to promote a belief as fact to simply bury their guesses in a stack of certified facts and hope the reader isn’t experienced enough in critical review to spot them.

It all starts out with the basic premise.  “We are the product of millenia of evolution.”  Absolutely true.  Unfortunately, that’s followed by their theory, presented as fact and logical conclusion:  “And our bodies haven’t changed much since then, so we should eat now what we ate then.”  ARE YOU %$&# KIDDING ME???  Both phrases in that statement have fatal errors.  (WARNING:  there will be science.  I will try not to reach eye-glazing levels, but I’ve got a nail here, so you’ve got to give me my hammer.)  Number one, we have changed.  I will grant that 10,000 years is a blink in the total genetic development of humankind, but it is by no means insufficient time to make substantive internal and external changes in anatomy.  Paleoanthropologists and archaeogeneticists are still arm-wrestling about it, but if what’s known as the “out of Africa” hypothesis is correct, then in 70,000 years of human history, we have gone from basically one population to every ethnic distinction on the planet, including height, weight, fat distribution, skeletal formation, and internal processes.  If 70,000 years is long enough to turn three similar creatures into, for example, a Maasai warrior, an Inuit, and, say, Björk, what could it not have done to our insides?  For comparison, the domestication of the dog roughly parallels the development of agriculture and domestic animal husbandry, so in the time since we were eating like hunter-gatherers, we have selectively bred a couple canine lines into everything from a mastiff to a chihuahua.  No big changes in 10,000 years?  I think not.

The second error?  Suggesting we should eat like cavemen presupposes two things, namely that cavemen were healthier than we are, which is patently untrue based on life expectancy, and that cavemen, given the opportunity to eat something other than what they were eating, would still choose their hunter-gatherer diet.  This is obviously untrue because we did develop agriculture and animal husbandry.  As soon as humans figured out a way to get calories that were always in the same place and didn’t have to be chased, they went for it in droves.  The population that can survive, reproduce, and pass on their DNA in the most efficient manner wins.  The time you spend chasing down your dinner is not available for mating or protecting your offspring.  It was anthropologically worthwhile for some populations to develop the ability to digest excellent nutrient sources like dairy, so we did, and since more milk-drinkers lived to pass on their DNA, more of their descendents can handle dairy.  The only places we see widespread lactose intolerance are where land and climate issues make it difficult to keep cows, so there was never a survival advantage in tolerating dairy.

Should You?  Can You?

I have two friends who tried the Paleo Diet; one gave up before a week was out.  I spoke to the second at day 27 of her 30-day induction, and I asked how it was going.  “I’ve got a lot more energy!” she said cheerily.  “And…?,” I asked.  “And I would kill you for a baked potato with butter and sour cream,” she said.  And therein lies the difficulty.  It’s just too extreme a lifestyle change for most people.  (If you think you can do it, try out the Four-Day Diet that I wrote about in You Can Stand Anything For Four Days, which is also free of dairy, gluten, and refined sugar and starch.)  And it has to be a lifestyle change, and the proponents know this.  Chemical and glycemic-dependent diets like Paleo and Atkins balance on a knife-edge, physiologically speaking.  One slip off the wagon, one good-sized injection of simple carbs, and the metabolic process collapses and you have to go back to start.  Maybe I overestimate the power of taste buds over will power, but I believe that any diet that tells you that you must give up most of your favorite foods for the rest of your life is doomed to failure.

We are omnivores.  We are designed to eat everything that doesn’t eat us first.  It’s what has kept us alive.  Unfortunately, now that food is so easy, it’s what’s killing us.  Cruel irony.  Will you lose weight on the Paleo Diet?  I’d bet money on it, if you can stick with it.  But you’ll also lose weight on Atkins, South Beach, Jenny Craig, and a host of other plans, simply because your eating is so heavily regulated.  My husband lost 20 pounds on Atkins, but gained it all back (and more) when he went off.  He likes Häagen-Dazs too much to stick with a low-carb lifestyle.  So we’ve started a “lifestyle change” where he eats sensibly during the week, gets regular exercise, and get Chocolate Peanut Butter on weekends.  The weight comes off a lot more slowly, but it does come off, and he’s happy.

We’d all do better without a lot of processed food.  Most of us eat too many simple carbs.  Some of us are better off without gluten.  Some of us are better off without dairy.  But whether your forebears hail from Yorkshire, Hokkaido, or the Arctic Circle has a lot more to do with what’s healthy for your body than what cave your ancient ancestors called home.  Heck, one of the premier examples of early modern man is the Paleolithic “Cro-Magnon” man, found in the south of France.  Roughly 45,000 years after this guy lived, we’re still trying to figure out why his descendents can eat an enormously high-fat diet (loaded with dairy, btw) without developing heart disease.  Slink off to your cave if you like, but before you go, passez-moi les croissants.

 

I won’t keep you in suspense– I LOVE this book.  I’m a bit squeamish about some of the recipes (if I tried to serve jiggling bone marrow to my husband, he’d just look hurt and wonder what he’d done to make me angry), but I love her no-nonsense approach to the defense of the foodstuff that has been keeping our species alive for millenia.

In Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes (Ten Speed Press, September, 2008… and okay, brevity is not the soul of book titles these days), Jennifer McLagan unapologetically lambasts the low-fat movement.  Pointing out that our fear of putting fat in our bodies has nonetheless caused us to put historically unprecedented amounts of it on our bodies, McLagan calls for a return of fat to our kitchens and our plates.  In fact, she champions a number of fats that I don’t think will really make significant inroads into the American palate; I believe butter should be its own food group, but I will not be spreading pure lard on my bread anytime soon, rosemary-infused or not.

A Quiet Rebuttal to Loud Propaganda

After reading a bit of the book, I looked carefully at McLagan’s bio and found that her college degree is in Economics, and I don’t mean Home Economics.  I mean that little-understood discipline full of unemotional people who routinely challenge our assumptions and slaughter our sacred cows armed with the twin blades of logic and statistics.  Using the same mind set that led Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (in the fabulous Freakonomics) to tell parents that it’s much safer to send your kids to play at a house where the owners have guns than it is to send them to play at a house with a swimming pool, McLagan calmly explains that no matter how loudly the anti-fat activists shout, the data still proves them wrong.  Our forebears frequently managed to live long, healthy, normal-weight lives while frying things in bacon fat, so there’s no reason to suppose that we can’t do the same.  (My grandmother’s diet consisted mostly of white bread, butter, beef BBQ, and pie, and she lived to be 95.)

McLagan starts out with a tiny bit of science, and I am ashamed to say that even with a background in science, I could not have told you why an Omega-3 fatty acid was called that.  Now I can.  (Not telling.  You’ll have to read it yourself.  It’s only a paragraph.)  She explains just enough about fat types to give you a basis for understanding why animal fat is not evil.  She delivers some hard truths about the role fat plays in giving food flavor, and why it is so satisfying to our taste buds.  And yes, you will get hungry reading this book.  Have some crusty bread and good butter at the ready.

Everything’s Better With Bacon and Butter

An Australian by birth (I have to think pretty hard before taking culinary advice from someone who can stand to eat Vegemite), and trained in classic French cooking, McLagan does recommend a lot of food items that I quite frankly find scary.  But there are plenty of American-accessible recipes here as well, starting with making your own Homemade Butter.  The whole butter chapter (subtitled “Worth It”) made me smile.  Though I think even I draw the line at agreeing with the blanket statement, “Butter is actually good for us,” (because of the fat-soluble vitamins and minerals it contains, pg. 15) I was glad to be reminded that more than one third of the fat in butter is monounsaturated.  The chapter on pork fat will be cheered by bacon lovers everywhere, and trust me, you really want to try the Bacon Spice Cookies.  Really.  And I wish I had read the chapter on poultry fat before I threw away the turkey fat I skimmed off the drippings from the Thanksgiving bird when I made gravy.  Sigh.  Live and learn.

Will eating fat make you fat?  Well, it depends on how much you eat.  Fat has more than twice the calories per gram as protein or carbohydrates (9 calories per gram versus 4).  On the other hand, as I mentioned in Juicing Your Java, fat is so satisfying to our mouths that when you take out the fat, you often have to replace it with more than double the carbs, so what are you saving?  Eating too much of anything is going to make you fat.  A little of something fabulous and satisfying can help you avoid a lot of something starchy and dull.  So check out McLagan’s Fat, and pardon me while I go butter something.  And may the Blessed Haseka keep your butter as fresh as the day it was churned.

A friend recommended Peter D’Adamo’s Eat Right 4 Your Type, and having now looked into it, I’ve got to wonder if she’d had her coffee before she read it.  Because total lack of brain function is the only excuse I can see for regarding this book as anything but complete and total hooey.  Was that harsh?  Gosh, and my blood type is supposed to make me so empathetic.

My first reaction was to wonder how a physician could be this irresponsible, but D’Adamo, it turns out, is not a physician.  He’s a “Doctor of Naturopathy” which means he’s completed roughly the course work required of a Physician Assistant (and PAs very carefully do NOT let themselves be called “doctor”), plus those important extra courses like herbal remedies, sorry, botanical medicine.  (Sorry to those of you who love your herbal supplements, but any plants that contain medicinal compounds with real efficacy are too dangerous not to be processed and measured to such an extant that you might as well have taken the pill in the first place.)

What I honestly expected to find in this book was something akin to that one-size-fits-all personality profile from the psychology experiment.  You know, where everybody gets the same profile, saying things like, “You enjoy being around people, but sometimes would rather be by yourself,” and “You don’t think you’ve really achieved your full potential,” that are true of most people.  Then the participants are asked to rate the accuracy of their profile, and of course most rate it as very accurate, proving either that people are very much alike, they are very gullible, or there is too much money available to fund psychology experiments (and perhaps all three).  I expected to find very similar suggestions for all types.  If that were the case, this book would be much less dangerous.

Old Data, New Mistakes

Unfortunately, D’Adamo bases his entire premise on incorrect information, namely, that type O is the oldest blood type.  He relied on research done in the 1950s and did not take into account current (and this is current as of 1990; D’Adamo published in 1996) conclusions that A is the oldest blood type, followed by B, then O.  D’Adamo basically characterizes type O as a hunter-gatherer, type A as a farmer, and type B as a herder, claiming that the blood groups diverged at the same time as human populations settled down to raise crops or migrated to open grasslands with their flocks.  Sadly, this is, and I’m using a scientific term here, poppycock.  The ABO blood types diverged millions of years ago, sometime between the time we decided to walk upright and the time we could call ourselves something reasonably human.  And it has nothing to do with migration or agriculture, because the same blood groups are found in most primate populations.  (Gorillas do not farm, and chimps that live more than a few miles from where they were born were forcibly moved.)

According to D’Adamo, those caveman type-Os should be eating the hunter-gatherer diet (and yes, the Paleo Diet is on my radar, watch for it!), the meek vegetarian type-As should be eating grains, and the steppes-dwelling type-Bs should be eating meat and dairy.  Um.  If you overlay some medical info over the map of blood type distribution, you’ll see that diabetes tend to be prevalent in the same places a lot of type-As live.  Type B is prevalent in Asia; know what else is prevalent in Asia?  Lactose intolerance.  So by the time the type-As are finished injecting their insulin and the type-Bs are doubled over from abdominal cramps, the aggressive type-Os are going to take over, regardless of what they’re eating.

You Are What You Bleed?

Meek?  Aggressive?  Oh yeah, D’Adamo also believes our blood type is an indicator of our personality.  He says that only type-Os are equipped to handle leadership positions.  Type-Bs are flexible but wishy-washy, and type-As should just give up now.  He actually recommends that type-As avoid crowds and loud noises.  I’d call him a typist, but that actually implies some usefulness, though given the death of typewriters and the replacement of “typing” with “word processing” I suppose the word typist is likely available to apply to someone who unfairly discriminates based on type.  Sadly, D’Adamo is not alone in his typist beliefs; many cultures have as much faith in your blood type’s ability to affect your destiny as the astrological sign under which you were born.  Recently (July, 2011),  Japanese reconstruction minister Ryu Matsumoto issued a statement blaming his blood type for some rash words that forced him to resign.  Well, it’s a novel spin on “the Devil made me do it.”

One of the basic tenets of naturopathy is to avoid overeating, and I’m on board with that.  Unfortunately, that tenet is followed closely by “eliminate alcohol and caffeine.”  (So sorry, but thanks for playing our game.)  We were all cavemen together, but since then we’ve not only had thousands of years for our bodies to adjust to new climates and foods, but many of us are fortunate enough to be prosperous enough to eat things that aren’t good for us.  And as long as we don’t do it all the time, our highly-evolved digestive systems will roll with the punches, regardless of our blood type.  So, unless you want to read the book for laughs, or you’re looking for an excuse for your next bone-headed moment,  just leave this one on the shelf.  Or do everybody a favor and move it to the fiction section where it belongs.

 

Suze Orman has pretty well locked up the top spot for go-to financial advice for women.  She is not only a financial guru, she is an entrepreneur and executive, an author, the host of her own TV show, and, well, a brand.  She makes me tired.  She has also learned all her financial savvy in the trenches, first at Merrill Lynch, and later at Prudential Bache Securities and eventually, her own firm.  (Her college degree is actually in social work, not finance.)

Suze Knows Best (Just Ask Her)

In her book, The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke, Orman sets out to show people who are well-educated and intelligent yet drowning in debt that they can learn some financial basics and get on the right financial road by dealing with the debt, learning about banking and investment, and working towards home ownership.  It’s a sound plan.

As a finance professional, I have to say that I can’t recall ever hearing Suze Orman give bad advice.  She certainly has a proven track record.  Unfortunately, as I said, she makes me tired, and that’s as much about listening to her (or reading her) as it is reading her resumé.  I always feel like she’s yelling at me.  She’s the financial alpha, and you’d better not challenge her, or you’ll find yourself running home with your metaphorical tail between your legs.  Maybe I’m contrary by nature, but when a pundit shouts at me that they’ve got the plan and I’d better follow it, I find I’m highly motivated to do something, in fact anything, else.

A Kinder, Gentler Way to Tell You Why You’re Broke

Beth Kobliner is a journalist who has worked for Money Magazine, among others.  She also picked up her money smarts after school (her degree is in literature).  She is a regular on the national public radio show, The Takeaway, and she serves as an advisor for Sesame Street’s financial education initiative.  She even appears in a video with Elmo.

In her book, Get a Financial Life, Kobliner sets out to show people who are well-educated and intelligent yet drowning in debt that they can learn some financial basics and get on the right financial road by dealing with the debt, learning about banking and investment, and working towards home ownership.  Sound familiar?

The thing that I like about Kobliner’s approach is that she assumes that if her readers were budding wheeler-dealers, they probably wouldn’t need her book.  The first “chapter” is basically a cheat sheet, the book boiled down to basic ideas (you can read it in a few minutes).  She understands that money stuff makes a lot of people’s eyes glaze over.  After quickly explaining why paying off your credit cards is really worthwhile, she says, “If you want a full explanation of this concept, turn to p. 34.  Otherwise take my word for it.”  Kobliner seems to sit down with you over coffee and say, “Here’s something I think you ought to try.”  It’s a much gentler approach.  Think of Kobliner as a life coach to Suze Orman’s drill sergeant.  I bet Suze Orman would have scared the pants off Elmo.  Wait– does he wear pants?

Both books are bestsellers, and they’ll both give you the same basic advice: pay off your credit cards, set up a savings plan, start building equity instead of paying rent (all of which are easier said than done if you’ve gotten into bad financial habits–I say again, it’s exactly like your diet).  Which book is likely to do you more good depends entirely on what kind of management style you prefer to work with.  If you need somebody on your case, go with Suze Orman.  If you want to feel like you’re talking to a friend, go with Beth Kobliner.  But if you’ve gotten to the point where you’re just paying the interest charges on your credit card each month, it’s time to go with someone.

In Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (Penguin Press, paperback edition January 2010, illustrated edition November 2011), Michael Pollan hopes to supply you with a back-to-basics food guide that you can read in 20 minutes, pore over and consider for hours, and then carry with you to restaurants and grocery stores to inform your every food-purchasing decision.  Kind of like Mao’s “Little Red Book,” only for food instead of Communism.  Sadly, he then put out a hardcover edition (illustrated by Maira Kalman) that costs twice as much and isn’t nearly so portable.

A lot of the rules will make you laugh, and hopefully think.  I love “Eat only food that will eventually rot.”  I have noticed that many bread products seem to have suspiciously long shelf lives.  When you have a nice fresh baked baguette that starts growing mold about Day 3 and a loaf of generic wheat sandwich bread that is four days older and looks perfect, be very afraid.

Other rules seem sensible until another rule contradicts it.  “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” is pretty clear, but then you get “Eat like the Japanese.”  I promise, my great-grandmother would have taken one look at tofu and used it as furniture polish.  (And “Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not.”  Tofurkey, anyone?)   Also, “Treat meat as a flavoring or special occasion food.”  If you sat my great-grandmother down to a table full of platters of grains and vegetables, she’d ask if the roast was still in the oven.

Rules Meant to be Broken

Then there are rules that simply make me question Mr. Pollan’s personal experience.  “Avoid foods that contain more than five ingredients.”  Really?  You don’t make a lot of soup, do you?  Darned few of my favorite recipes contain fewer than five ingredients.  As long as those ingredients are in themselves “food” by Mr. Pollan’s definition, I can’t see that taking them together as a group should be a problem.  Oh, and “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.”  I have an awesome whole foods restaurant near my house, and they have curbside takeaway.  I get it, he doesn’t like fast food, and neither do I, but a few of the rules seem to be more generalized than what I’m sure he’d like to say, which is “Don’t eat at McDonald’s.”

One of the most shocking rules to me is “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.”  Happily, I know how to cook and I enjoy it, so this would give me carte blanche to weigh 300 pounds in no time.  I don’t deep fry stuff very often, not because it’s a big deal, but because I know it’s bad for me (and I hate to waste that much oil, because I will NOT store and reuse it). This rule will certainly achieve Mr. Pollan’s goal of weaning you off processed food, because once you’ve tasted home-made potato chips, you will never want to open a bag again.  Unfortunately, a lot of food that is really, really bad for you is really, really easy to cook.  I am completely behind rule #63, though, which is “Cook.”  We are getting fat on stuff we’d never put in our mouths if it wasn’t handed to us in disguise.

The one that really bugged me was clearly there to be clever.  At least I hope so.  “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”  Can’t it be both?  A lot of canned and frozen vegetables are processed in plants, but they often retain more vitamins than fresh vegetables because they were left on the vine or tree longer and then harvested just before cooking or freezing (often within 24 hours– that head of spinach in your grocery store was on a truck longer than that).  And I am not going to buy cacao beans and render my own chocolate.  And if Mr. Pollan expects me to give up chocolate, we are going to have a problem.

Good Theory, Hard to Practice

But I’m with him on many things, like “Pay more, eat less” which has something in common with my “Eat like a Millionaire”plan.  Pollan believes, as do most foodies, that American food businesses have been so busy trying to make food cheaper that they have sacrificed both taste and nutritive value.  I’m lucky enough to live in a place where I can buy Prime organic beef (and right across the street) if I want to; not everybody can.  On the other hand, not everyone can afford to pay three times as much for organic bananas, especially when you’re going to peel them.

As with so many good intentions, Pollan’s rules ultimately run afoul of most people’s real lives.  How nice if we could all shop at nearby farmers’ markets and sit down with our families at a table for every meal.  Mr. Pollan was raised on Long Island, and now lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay area.  His wife is an artist, and they both work from home.  I’ve been in the situation of working at an office all day and coming home not to rest, but to start my second job caring for my home and family.  I will never criticize a working Mom who makes the occasional stop at Burger Sovereign or Pizza Palace in order to have five minutes to herself when she gets home.  Happily, there are increasingly available quality frozen meals that may have the odd long-winded ingredient in them, but that are orders of magnitude improvements over fast food.  Not all processed food is poison, and I wish Mr. Pollan had included “Read labels and become a smart consumer” in his rules.

Many reviewers have pointed out that a lot of the rules are common sense, and they are, but sadly, common sense isn’t all that common.  Most everybody who can walk and chew gum at the same time knows that to lose weight you need to eat less and exercise more, yet millions of diet books are sold every year.  Clearly many of us need a conscience to keep preaching common sense into our ear, especially when we’re passing a Krispy Kreme store, and that’s just what Pollan’s Rules are meant to do.  The last rule is, “Break the rules once in a while,” by which Pollan acknowledges that if Jiminy Cricket doesn’t shut up occasionally, he’s going to get squashed.  It’s worth a look; I recommend the slimmer, cheaper edition that fits in your purse.  Consider getting a few as stocking stuffers for friends and family who need a little nudge to get out of the fast-food habit.

And Now, For the Advanced Students…

If you want a little more explanation of Pollan’s views and you aren’t afraid of a book with more paragraphs than slogans, you might prefer Pollan’s previous work In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin, April 2009).  This book covers much of the same ground as the Rules, so if you get this one, you don’t really need the shorter work.  Pollan opens the book with his manifesto’s mission statement, “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.”  Of course, he then goes on for 256 pages to explain to you what he means by each of those words, none of which are as obvious as they seem. 

I agree with a lot of what Pollan has to say; in fact, my husband commented that a section “sounded like me,” probably because of Pollan’s use of the term “edible foodlike substance” to avoid calling overly-processed comestibles “food.”  Personally, I think Pringle’s are one of the signs of the Apocalypse, and not only do I not allow them in my house, I will not dignify them by calling them potato chips (which I love– see above).  I refer to them as “dehydrated reconstituted chopped, pressed, and formed processed potato food product,” for they deserve no better.  But I have spent some time in food processing businesses, and I simply don’t have the fear of them that Mr. Pollan seems to have.  I have neither the time nor the inclination to grow all my own food, and I’m happy to pay someone else to do it.  Often, I’m happy to pay a little more to someone who does it especially well.

Pollan’s 2006 work, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is best avoided.  Pollan really sets out to forward his vegetarian agenda and, I believe, unfairly characterizes much of the food industry.  Having begun my collegiate career looking to study veterinary medicine, I have a fair bit of experience with animal processing and slaughter facilities, and all I can say is that Pollan clearly went to different slaughter facilities than I did.  Pollan actually released a “Young Reader’s Edition” of Dilemma, and trust me when I say that if you give this book to your children, they may never eat again.  Stick to the “Food” titles unless you’re committed to giving up life as you know it and moving to a commune.  This omnivore will be here tucking into my steak.

 

One of the things I wanted to do with 2 Rich 2 Thin was address the incredible volume of misinformation and outright untruths repeated again and again by weight-loss pundits.  Well, yippy skippy, now I don’t have to, because Dr. Nancy Snyderman has done it for me, and since she has a medical degree, and gets paid by NBC News to keep abreast of the latest medical research, she has chops I just can’t bring to the table.

Nancy Snyderman’s Diet Myths That Keep Us Fat (Crown Archetype, May 2009) is exactly what it says on the cover, an explosion of much of the “conventional wisdom” surrounding weight loss.  From “everything you eat after 8pm turns to fat” to “muscle weighs more than fat” (yeah, that one really depressed me), Snyderman addresses commonly-held beliefs that simply aren’t true, sharing the current science as well as her own experience and that of her patients.  She doesn’t just tell you, she proves it to you.

The Doctor is In-Valuable

I felt while reading this book that in many places it said exactly what I wanted to say.  A doctor who says you can have a hot fudge sundae for dinner!  She even makes the genes/jeans pun.  You’ll probably find, as I did, that you’re convinced well before she runs out of science, so feel free to skip to the next header if the medical facts start to make your eyes glaze over.  Most of it is fairly plain language, though, so you shouldn’t get so bogged down you want to stop.

Of course, as a doctor, she spends a lot of time focusing on obesity-related health issues.  If it has been awhile since you’ve seen a doctor, try to pay attention to the scary stuff.  The one thing that always worries me about offering ideas and recipes on this website is that I don’t know your health history.  I don’t want to recommend something to you that’s loaded with sodium (sadly, salt makes most everything taste better) if you’re an undiagnosed sodium-sensitive hypertension sufferer.  Reading this book will in no way replace seeing a doctor, but it might give you an idea of where to start the conversation with your own doctor.  Go in with a list of questions– that always makes them nervous.

All in all, I have to say, it’s two thumbs up from me on this book.  You’ll learn a lot, and a lot of it will look familiar after you’ve been around this site.  So why should you read my website when you can buy this book?  I’m way funnier.

I’ve spent some time in France and trust me, French women get fat just like the rest of us.  Sophisticated urban French women don’t as a rule, but then neither do sophisticated urban American women.  But I have to agree with Mireille Guiliano that French women eat more and have more fun staying thin than their American counterparts.

French Women Don’t Get Fat (paperback edition published by Vintage, December, 2007) is a blend of Guiliano’s life story and her lifestyle advice.   As a French exchange student, she came to America a normal weight and went home fat (her father met her at the boat and told her she looked like a sack of potatoes), thus beginning her search for a way to have both croissants and designer clothes.  Now in her 60s and dividing her time between America and France, Guiliano offers anecdotes and recipes along with her basic philosophy– that Americans eat too much, sit too much, worry too much, and consequently, weigh too much. 

…food is not your enemy (in reasonable portions), eating fabulous food can actually help you lose weight, and starving and depriving yourself will only end in tears and muumuus.

 

C’est Vrai?

Much of the book is right in line with the 2Rich2Thin philosophy, namely that food is not your enemy (in reasonable portions), that eating fabulous food can actually help you lose weight, and that starving and depriving yourself will only end in tears and muumuus.  There are also some wonderful recipes for yummy French food.  On the other hand, I found the writing style a little pretentious (and trust me, if I find it pretentious, a normal person is in serious danger of rolling their eyes right out of their sockets).  When “France” or “French” appears so often in the book, most people are capable of remembering that the author is French without French phrases creeping cutely into the text, n’est-ce pas?  (By the way, I actually read French, and even I found the “franglais” annoying.)

There’s a line in The Devil Wears Prada where a character details her diet plan as, “I eat nothing at all, and then just before I pass out, I eat a piece of cheese.”  Guiliano would be horrified by that, but hers would be something like, “I take two hours to eat five golf-ball-sized portions of incredibly good food and drink a glass of champagne and two glasses of mineral water, and then I walk for an hour.”  (There is reportedly more to compare between Mireille Guiliano and The Devil Wears Prada, but that’s not my beat– try Gawker.)  My biggest criticism of the plan is that it bears little resemblance to the lives and schedules of normal American women.  One of her major peeves, and she’s not wrong, is eating on the run; unfortunately, many women have two choices– eat on the run, or don’t eat.  And of course there’s the difficulty of totally revamping meals and meal times when you have to plan around a family of overscheduled picky eaters.  Most of us would be thinner tomorrow if we had only ourselves to consider.

…But a Little More Self-Love Wouldn’t Hurt

Something she doesn’t mention, and perhaps she should, is that French women have a much earthier connection to their bodies.  Clothing-optional is not limited to perfect figures, nor is sexy lingerie.  If you spend an entire afternoon and hundreds of dollars buying a custom bra and matching panties, you’re well motivated to avoid that extra slice of pizza.  And you might also find that in gorgeous lingerie you look way sexier than frowning over the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition would lead you to expect.

I’d say the book is definitely worth checking out (of your library).  You’ll like a lot of what she has to say, and you may find some insights that you can work into your own plan.  As far as buying goes, I recommend a different purchase of Madame Guiliano’s wares.  After her book was published, Guiliano retired as CEO of Champagne Veuve Clicquot, my hands-down favorite brand of champagne (okay, I prefer Dom Perignon, but I can’t afford it very often).  A bottle will cost you more than the book, and it won’t last nearly as long, but you’ll enjoy every drop of it.  And there’s nothing more French than that.